Comments on Where are those damn kids?

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  • i like this one too. Some clown, more like a monster scaring away the kids. Good choice going for B+W as the color would have possibly gotten in the way of the mood. However, what was great about Nickolson as Joker was the smile painted on what was an evil face and I'm not sure it would have been as effective without bright colors. I'd have to see this one in color to know for sure but I do like it this way.

    Also, nice use of shallow dof to draw attention to the face yet show kids in less focus. Very nicely seen and exposed.
    Richard @ 2006-11-15 04:35:41
  • What an amazing shot! Love what you did with it in photoshop and the B&W conversion really works as does the DoF.
    Danella @ 2006-11-26 22:17:14
  • Beautiful image my friend!!
    John Adams @ 2007-07-17 01:46:00
  • omg ! that scared the living shit out of me ! oh my god !
    raychel webb @ 2008-05-06 04:51:33
  • I think that in B&W is even creepier.
    Vitor @ 2008-12-21 13:45:10


   

   

   

   

Where are those damn kids?

San Jose, California, September 2005. I'm really happy with this shot. I played around with it quite a bit in Photoshop, mostly just experimenting with isolating the clown and blurring the background to make it look like the clown was spinning on something. While the effect was neat (and believable), I ultimately decided to just crop it a bit and play around with the color.

The original colors were brilliant, but after desaturating everything I knew that I had to present it in black and white. To get the black and white seen here, I did the following: created a new hue/saturation adjustment layer with mode set to "color"; created a second hue/saturation adjustment layer with the mode set to "normal" on top of the first adjustment layer and set the saturation of this layer to -100; went back to the first adjustment layer and adjusted the hue/saturation until I was happy.

I'll leave the context and circumstances of the shot to the imagination.